[ruby-core:55642] [CommonRuby - Feature #8568] Introduce RbConfig value for native word size, to avoid Fixnum#size use

["headius (Charles Nutter)" <headius@headius.com>]

Issue #8568 has been updated by headius (Charles Nutter).


Size of a pointer is probably what I'm looking for, since that's usually what people will be using it for. However, implementations that can't give out real pointers can't support pack("p"), so that's not a portable option either.

So... RbConfig::CONFIG['pointer_size'] and some constant?
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Feature #8568: Introduce RbConfig value for native word size, to avoid Fixnum#size use
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8568#change-40126

Author: headius (Charles Nutter)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: 
Target version: 


Fixnum#size is not really useful to represent native word size across all platforms and implementations. On JRuby, for example, our Fixnum is always represented as a 64-bit Java "long" value, regardless of the underlying native platform. There may be other implementations that fix Fixnum's size to a specific bit width as well. Therefore, using Fixnum#size to determine the size of a word on the underlying native platform is not reliable.

I propose two additions to Ruby:

1. RbConfig value "word_size" for native word size. This could reflect bit size (32, 64) or byte size (4, 8).

2. A constant, somewhere in Ruby, to provide access to this value more directly. I'm not sure where this should go. ObjectSpace::WORD_SIZE?


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